Shannan Rouss Thinks She Dated Joan Didion's Man

"My copy of Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays is dog-eared and covered in notes. I write in the margins and on the book's final blank pages. The latest scrawl: pink prison cells, an indoor ice rink in summer. I don't know what these snippets will become, if they will become anything at all. But this is the novel I go to when I'm stuck, when my mind gets sluggish and my writing feels drab and clunky. There are so many lines worth committing to memory, lines that scare me a little because I'm afraid I'll never write anything as good. For example, Didion writes of the main character Maria, `She did not decide to stay in Vegas. She only failed to leave.' I read that and nod. It's so accurately put. Or when Maria and her husband Carter are talking, on the verge of argument but not quite there, he speaks to her `in a careful monotone, a prosecutor with an open-and-shut case.' God, I think I dated this man. Probably more than once."